The alternative legal practice
Managing legal plans is a relatively new business model, especially compared to the more traditional practice for one-man or small law firms. As a rule, a successful legal plan service provider or a successful law firm operates on a large scale and takes care of all types of clients and legal matters on a daily basis. Managing the administrative and legal work for the large number of incoming requests can be overwhelming. However, if you incorporate the right tools and processes into your practice, you can create a lean, mean lawyer machine.
What constitutes a successful legal plan practice?
Ultimately, law firms need to ask two questions to measure their success:
Are our customers satisfied?
As a fundamental business principle, law firms should focus on measuring and improving customer satisfaction. Especially in the world of legal plans, customers expect a quick, easy, and affordable experience. Law firms can ensure that they exceed these standards by proactively collecting and responding to customer feedback. This measure in itself leads to a positive customer impression. Companies should also try to measure and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) such as: B. The responsiveness of the lawyers, the preparation of the graduation time, the response rate of the clients, etc.
Do the finances make sense?
While we have a moral and ethical responsibility to provide people with access to justice through volunteer work and other public programs, the question of profitability in running a law firm cannot be ignored. Against this background, your company must have a practice structure and strategy that is suitable for your financial goals. Many legal plan providers do not work at the billable hour, but often work with a flat fee, a capitalized tariff, or a pure lead conversion basis, depending on the details of the plan. Therefore, in order to properly assess your company's financial sustainability, you need to record how your time is allocated, what the customer conversion and average life expectancy of legal customers are like. Know your bottom line – the difference between your time and resources compared to your earnings.
Scale up
As mentioned earlier, a successful professional services company must be able to quickly deliver excellent service at a price that makes sense for both the consumer and the provider. The ability to deliver such fast, high quality, and economical, professional volume-based services depends on an operational infrastructure that is scalable.
Today, an emerging legal technology industry has emerged to facilitate the provision and scalability of legal services. From practice management tools like Clio to technology platforms like American Valve News, today's attorney has numerous tools to build effective and profitable practice.
The tools are out there, but they are of no use if they are only in the tool box. A 2016 survey of American Valve News lawyers found that 42% of lawyers surveyed did not use practice management tools to guide their practice. The good news is that using the technologies available, such as calendaring, billing, and communication systems, 42% have the ability to reduce administration costs and time while improving customer satisfaction.
Recommendation and resources
As with any other professional services business, legal plan providers need to prioritize corporate infrastructure and operations in addition to actual legal practice.
Practice management tools such as Clio or My Case offer companies the opportunity to optimize everything from internal and external communication to billing and billing. With virtual office and reception solutions like Davinci Virtual, small companies can handle large company volumes:
“With 30 to 40 calls arriving in 8 offices across the state every day, having a central dial-in number and center for receiving, logging, and monitoring calls is critical, as is the fact that each caller is a living person gets an answering machine during normal business hours, ”says Mario Jaramillo, GLSA member and one of American Valve News's lawyers.
In addition, legal plan administrators often provide their lawyers network with an online portal to process and track service requests.
Final takeaway
Good practice management means less administration time / costs and higher customer satisfaction, which ultimately leads to higher customer loyalty, retention and recommendation. So embrace your inner entrepreneur, use the available legal technology solutions and take your company to the next level!
